Separate crawlability from ranking claims
A readiness check can tell you whether public signals are present and coherent. It should not promise search rankings, AI citations, traffic, or revenue. The useful job is finding gaps that a site owner can actually patch.
- Confirm the public URL fetches successfully.
- Inspect title, description, canonical URL, and OpenGraph-style metadata.
- Check robots.txt for intentional allow or deny behavior.
- Verify that sitemap discovery works from robots.txt or /sitemap.xml.
Look for machine-readable context
Structured data, sitemap entries, and llms.txt can make public intent clearer for crawlers and downstream tools. The important part is consistency: the page, robots policy, sitemap, and structured data should describe the same public entity.
- Add schema.org JSON-LD for the relevant entity type.
- Keep sitemap URLs aligned with the pages you actually want crawled.
- Treat llms.txt as an emerging signal, not a universal standard.
- Re-run the check after one visible patch to verify the delta.
Use evidence, not a vanity score
Scores are useful for prioritization, but the evidence behind each gap is what makes the work actionable. A good report should name the missing signal, show how it was detected, and recommend one next patch.